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Rice Jelly
Take a quarter of a pound of rice and half a pound of loaf sugar; boil these ingredients in a quart of water, and when they become a gelatinous mass strain off the jelly. Add lemon-juice or wine, and let the jelly cool, then serve.
A sickroom preparation rather than a dessert, and it behaves like one: the set comes entirely from rice starch, so the cooking has to be long and slow enough to burst the grains.
- The quantities in metricA quarter pound of rice is about 115 g, half a pound of sugar about 225 g, and an imperial quart is 40 fl oz (1.14 litres). The sugar is high by modern taste and can be cut by a third without affecting the set.
- Loaf sugarRefined cane sugar sold in hard cones, broken up with sugar nippers. Ordinary granulated or caster sugar is the direct equivalent.
- Which riceUse a short or round grain pudding rice, or ground rice, which releases starch freely. Long-grain and parboiled rice stay separate and will never give the "gelatinous mass" the recipe depends on.
- The hinge: cook it to collapseThis wants 45 minutes to an hour at the barest simmer, stirred often, until the grains have disintegrated into a thick slurry. Undercooked rice gives cloudy liquid that sets to nothing. Cover loosely and top up with hot water if it reduces too far.
- Straining"Strain off the jelly" means pressing the hot mass through a fine sieve or a scalded muslin-lined colander. Work quickly; once it cools it stiffens and will not pass. The drained rice pulp left behind is bland on its own.
- Lemon or wine goes in lastAdd the flavouring off the heat. Acid and alcohol both boiled at length lose their point, and a long boil with lemon juice can thin a starch set.
- Setting and yieldChill four hours or overnight in small moulds or cups. Starting from a quart of water, the strained yield will be appreciably less after long boiling; exactly how much depends on how far it reduces. It is a soft, sliceable-at-best set, not a firm gelatine one, and it stiffens further over a day.
- KeepingRefrigerate and eat within two days. Starch gels weep as they age, and this one has nothing in it to preserve it.
Rice jelly belongs to the invalid cookery that fills a corner of nearly every Victorian household manual, sitting alongside arrowroot, sago, gruel, calf's-foot jelly and beef tea. The logic of the period held that a sick or convalescent stomach wanted food that was bland, warm, sweetened and already broken down, and rice boiled to a paste and strained clear fitted the brief exactly; the lemon juice or wine was there as much to make it palatable to someone with no appetite as for flavour. Cassell's, published in London in the later nineteenth century and aimed at a broad middle-class readership, treats such preparations as a basic domestic skill rather than a medical one, since nursing a household through illness was work done at home. It is also a reminder of how much jelly-making, before packet gelatine, relied on starch and long boiling.